Teacher in Development

Blogging and podcasts (for listening and content creation), have very obvious applications for intermediate and advanced level English learners. What happens when you have a room full of true beginners? Can 2.0 help you?

Aaron Campbell has a really useful post around this that I really appreciated.

Flickr for “Low Level” EFL Students

“Students can begin by constructing their own galleries and profiles, while adding short descriptions and ‘notes’ to their own photos. This can be coupled with tag searches for themes of interest, followed by building a contact list and making simple comments on interesting photos. It doesn’t take a linguistic expert to carry out these tasks, and they are fun to do, too.” (Campbell, 2006 par. 2)

What I really liked about Aaron’s idea was how well this type of work would lend itself to learner autonomy.

Flickr’s growing picture bank is mind numbingly huge, and that means finding things that are personally relevant or interesting to students will be quite easy. That ups the probability of them getting hooked, of doing it themselves, of connecting with somoeone else {an English speaker}- OUTSIDE of the classroom.

“Placing [english learners] in a Web 2.0 environment and showing them how to use its tools to meet people and express themselves, is far more likely to motivate them to want to learn further than sitting in a traditional classroom with their peers doing pair work - they’ve already been exposed to that and it has obviously failed to do the trick.”(Campbell, 2006. Par. 3)

Isn’t that the truth? 2.0 classrooms, be they ESL or other, up their level of interestingness the more they merge with relevance to STUDENTS.

I teach business English in companies around Mexico City. I’ve never had a group where computers where available in class and students never seem to have time to seriously delve into blogging or podcasting etc.

So I become the web. It’s a slow beginning, but at least I can leverage some 2.0 power. Adopting me as the net approach to Aaron’s idea:
1. I pay careful attention to my student’s hobbies, passions, interests etc.
2. I go to flickr and find pictures of interest. I print them off - and include the comment space under the picture.
3. Students write their comments on paper.

You could stop there, or go a little further. What if you took those same pictures, with the student’s comments, and handed them around the room, or even to other English groups. Other students could post their comments as well, and then return the pictures back to the original commenters.

It’s not instantaneous, but it follows the principal of interaction. Of communicating for and with an audience. Best of all, it’s PERSONAL.